Businesses are growing increasingly dependent on distributed computing environments and wide area computer networks to accomplish critical tasks. Indeed, a wide variety of business applications are deployed across intranet, extranet and Internet connections to effect essential communications with workers, business partners and customers. As the number of users, applications and external traffic increases, however, network congestion forms, impairing business application performance. Enterprise network managers, therefore, are constantly challenged with determining the volume, origin and nature of network traffic to align network resources with business priorities and applications.
Data compression, caching and other technologies that optimize network traffic can be deployed to improve the efficiency and performance of a computer network and ease congestion at bottleneck links. For example, implementing data compression and/or caching technology can improve network performance by reducing the amount of bandwidth required to transmit a given block of data between two network devices along a communications path. Data compression technologies can be implemented on routing nodes without alteration of client or server end systems, or software applications executed therein, to reduce bandwidth requirements along particularly congested portions of a communications path. For example, tunnel technologies, like those used in Virtual Private Network (VPN) implementations, establish tunnels through which network traffic is transformed upon entering at a first network device in a communications path and restored to substantially the same state upon leaving a second network device. Such tunnel technologies, however, can only be implemented to improve network performance of a limited number of pre-configured communications paths, as they require a network administrator to manually configure at least two nodes in each path [such nodes are typically a VPN server deployed on the enterprise's network and a VPN client remote from the enterprise network]. These technologies, however, do not automatically identify a routing node or other network device in a communications path that includes functionality allowing for the creation of transformation tunnels to optimize or otherwise enhance network performance.
Given the vast array of routing nodes, each including a variety of configurations and capabilities, distributed across modern computer networks, the challenge becomes determining which communications paths can be optimized or otherwise tunneled in this manner, as altering network traffic at one node along a path in a way not recoverable or understood by the destination end-system will result in communication failures, if there is no network device along the path to reverse the transformation. Existing technologies would require a network administrator to manually discover and configure hundreds, and even thousands, of transformation tunnels to enhance network performance for a substantial amount of network traffic. In light of the foregoing, a need exists in the art for methods, apparatuses and systems that facilitate determinations as to whether there exists another network device along a communications path that is capable of establishing a compatible transformation tunnel. The present invention substantially fulfills this need.